


Fire Cycle

by RosemarysBabysitter (TashaElizabeth)



Category: Trouble in the Heights (2011)
Genre: F/M, Loss of Virginity, Public Sex, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-13
Updated: 2014-09-13
Packaged: 2018-02-17 06:41:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2300144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TashaElizabeth/pseuds/RosemarysBabysitter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt fill from an anon on tumblr asking for 'nevada being genuinely in love with the barrio's good girl'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire Cycle

Nevada went to the newsstand, bought a pack of cigarettes and saw the girl behind the counter as she handed him his change. He saw her long black hair and her wide brown eyes and her soft dark skin and he smiled at her before he knew what he was doing. He came back that afternoon and when she wasn’t there he came back at the next morning and every morning for the next three weeks.

It took less than a day to find out exactly who she was and where she lived and what she was doing. That she went to school in the afternoons and spent her nights at home, studying her textbooks and babysitting her sister’s kids. That she lived with her grandmother in a little apartment six floors up and she volunteered at church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. That her name was Phoenix and she was sweet and clean and holy. Everyone who spoke to Nevada made this clear with sullen expressions and hard set jaws. The old ladies at the bus station rearranged their weathered hands with indignity at Nevada’s interest and boys as young as middle schoolers got pushy and defensive when he said her name.

So he bought his cigarettes and he looked at her and she gave him back his change until one day she gave him back a dollar too many. He trudged all the way back up the street in the last crusts of winter snow to return it to her. To look at her again. When she smiled he knew that she had done it on purpose.

“Why would you…?” “Worth it. To know if you’re a good person.”

Nevada stood on the curb with his jacket pockets full of product in little plastic bags. He laughed with a harsh, braying desperation and then he asked her to dinner. She said no.

He asked again the next day and again the next week and when the spring began to simmer and show in the air and the trees he bought two cups of coffee and asked her to walk with him. She did. They circled the block and then circled the park and then walked the length of the neighborhood. He held her hand and when she said things that made him want to hold her he brought her hand to his nose and smelled the skin of her soft knuckles. When he finally kissed her after nine weeks of sweet torture she tasted like honey and apples and she made him sweat.

Nevada himself never seemed to enter the conversation. They talked about her job at the newsstand and the classes she was taking this semester. They talked about all the things she had loved as a child and the boys she had not loved because she had been home studying. “You mean you…” “I’ve never…” He made a face like she had pained him. 

He called her on the phone and spoke pleasantly in Spanish to her half deaf grandmother so that he could listen to her talk about whatever she wanted to talk about until she had to go.

He took her to the zoo when the animals were sleepy and sluggish with the early spring cold. He took her to breakfast in a nice bistro just out of the neighborhood that he shouldn’t have been able to afford. He took her to the museum and his eyes glazed over as they followed the docent from room to cluttered room. 

He took her to dinner, finally. She wore her sister’s dress and silk flowers in her hair and there was warm light and hot rich smells. He looked at her over the white linen table. Then she told him that instead of taking her home he should take her to a hotel.

She waited in the car, slouched down under the warmth of his jacket while he made the arrangements. When he brought her into the room the lights were low and the neon sign across the street glowed blue and red alternately through the drawn curtain. Nevada wiped at his lips with his fingers repeatedly as though he couldn’t stand the taste of his own mouth. He fiddled with a lighter from his pocket and lit a cluster of candles on the bedside table. She smiled to herself and dropped the coat. It fell to the floor with a loud, heavy thud.

He laid her down on the bed and unbuttoned the dress down the length of her torso with slow reverence as though each bit of plastic were a heavy totemic charm. His fingertips were rough. His nails were ragged. He apologized. She put his hand on her breast and he stroked and touched every inch of her smooth brown skin.

No blood. No pain. “But people said….” “People lie.” Just the sweet smell of him and the pressure of him deep in her core.

She imagined she’d run to confession the next day but she didn’t . She breathed, grateful and comfortable for the first time in years. The weight of her own sweet innocence was lifted when she took the weight of his stomach over hers. For once, when people cooed and awed and made much of her petty accomplishments she could take them with smiles and grace. When they talked about how much better she was then them and their beautiful lives in their dirty little streets she could nod. She could take it because she knew it wasn’t true. She had done the big bad deed and she had done it with the baddest boy on the block. She could breath again like she was child. She could live again in the real world.

They ran around all summer and she terrified everyone. She could see the fear and disappointment in their faces. She took one summer class and got her first C. Nevada kissed her in the library and she had tried to put her hands down his pants in the back of the historical fiction section. He had just wanted to kiss her. He kissed her all over the neighborhood, in the park and the subway and the back alley across from her church. He kissed her in the rain and wrapped her inside his coat while he was kissing to keep her safe and warm and dry. 

“We shouldn’t again. Not unless we’re…” “I will. I will.” 

Nevada acquired a ring and she spread herself out on a blanket in the park and showed her bare legs to anyone who would look under the tangle of his jeans. She didn’t dare wear the little diamond and kept it under some socks and eye shadow in the disaster of her top dresser drawer. She would stop sometimes and take it out and hold it to the hot summer light and it would sparkle in the orange summer sun. In the sparkle, she could feel him holding her.

He held her against him at every opportunity and then, when the fall broke into cool nights and soft winds, he got into a fight over money on a dimly lit street corner overseen by the security camera of the appliance store across the street. He got a year for assault. He would have gotten more but the camera couldn’t see Nevada’s puño americano in the dark.

She sobbed great dripping rings of eyeliner down her cheeks and crumpled the top pages of the newspapers under her hands and had to smooth and straighten them when the customers stopped by. The first possible chance she rode a bus all day, fidgeting and biting her nails, to visit him for an hour in a crowded room like a high school cafeteria. His laced his fingers in between hers and kissed her wrists and her palms.

“I can be sorry,” he said and she didn’t have an answer. He looked so tired and so young.

After six weeks without him he began to fade away. The ache for him began to dull and she did not feel compelled to take the long bus ride down to see him or rush to the phone for his call. One day, she realized she had not thought of him once in at least forty eight hours. She recovered, as though he had been an illness spurned on by exposure to his body and the thick sound of his voice.

The sale of the little diamond paid for the last Spring semester of college.

Nevada got off a bus one day and came to the stand to buy cigarettes. There was fury and abandonment in his eyes. He paid with a crisp new hundred dollar bill and she gave him his change. Every single cent and no more.

She got a job teaching aggressively private school children how to count in Spanish in Connecticut. It was a real job and paid real money. She packed up the little apartment and moved her half deaf grandmother and her sister’s kids to a little house in the suburbs there. She left the Heights in a rented van with the kids hanging out the windows and yelling at their friends as she drove. She left the Heights and she never, ever came back.


End file.
